Gene Logsdon: Lima Beans Into November

Bad weather almost always brings a few good results, something to hang on to in the time of adversity. After the extremely dry summer, rain came here again in September and October and nature reacted with a tremendous spurt of new growth. Sometimes I wonder if during drought the soil doesn’t store up energy that is then unleashed when moisture returns. Anyway, among various good effects of this spurting green revival, our pole lima beans decided to come alive with new growth and blossoms. Aiding that spurt of growth, we suffered no killing frost going into November. (The photo shows the pole beans after the last harvest, after frost did come on Nov. 5.)

So on October 27, with the “storm of the century” bearing down on us (seems like every year now we have the storm of the century), Carol and I were out in the cold wind harvesting the last of these late beans. We picked even the ones that we normally might leave to mature another day or two. The advantage of pole limas is that you can hold a pod up to the sky light without picking it and ascertain the size of the beans inside. The secret of a really tasty lima bean is to harvest it when it is just a little bigger than a man’s thumbnail which is difficult to determine any other way. By the time the bean is plump enough to feel with your fingers, it has past its tenderest, tastiest stage.

Shivering in the wind and with fingers turning blue, we rushed back to the warm kitchen with our treasure and shelled out the beans. This is a tedious job when the beans are so small and thin yet— true “baby” limas. Not many gardeners will go to the trouble. (Regular baby bush limas are not very palatable to our tastes because when they are at this size they are already mature and starting to get tough.) We almost have to shred the pods into pieces to get these immature beans out. But we know how awesomely tasty they will be, cooked for five minutes in a little water, salt and butter. Besides it is nice to have a good excuse for not being out in those gale winds, cleaning up the garden for the winter. An hour later, we were eating these crunchy, nutty little nuggets of beans, every bit as tasty as fresh peas in May.

Pole beans aren’t as popular as bush beans. Pole limas are even less popular than pole string beans. I guess most gardeners don’t want the extra work of putting up the poles. We think it is worth it because we are convinced that pole beans taste better and because we have a whole woodlot from which to get dead tree saplings and branches that we can use for poles. Also there is not nearly as much stooping and bending involved in harvesting the beans compared to bush beans. We stand up four poles in a teepee shape, tie them together at the top and thrust the butt ends into the ground a bit. Then do another teepee and then a third for three successive plantings. I link the teepees together with horizontal poles running from one teepee top to another and then to fence posts at either end of the planting. It would take quite a storm wind to blow them over.

I used to plant bean seeds six inches apart in two rows right along the inside of the poles. Carol and I got in a huge argument about this. She insists that planting the seeds in a little ring around each pole will allow the vines to grow up around the poles better— as every oldtimer in Kentucky knows, she says. I laughed at such superstition. But this spring I let her have her way, snickering all the while. Guess what. When planted my way, the vines often crawl irritatingly along the ground and I have to manually get them started up the poles. With Carol’s method, the vines almost always go right up the poles with no help. I can’t believe it but then neither do I believe that pole beans climb the poles clockwise north of the equator and counter-clockwise south of the equator. But that’s supposed to be fact.
~~

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Today, a new psychological repression hides in plain sight. It is the servant of a modern ideology, a religion really, that says the material world is soulless and merely fodder for economic growth. This repression prevents most from seeing our ecological predicament and therefore from understanding it or acting in response to it. This repression is of the v […]

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Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who thinks atheists are missing out because we don’t have cool hats like other religious people, says there are some Protestants who believe in a childish version of faith… [According to atheists, religious people] are also supposed to believe in a God who answers prayers here below and gives us goodies if [Read More...]

This is a neat project.Matt Cubberly wrote a book introducing children to evolution via poetry and neat illustrations by May Villani. It's called Evolutionary Tales and they're raising funds for it on Kickstarter:

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

What is not worth doing, is not worth doing well. ~Abraham Maslow

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Zeno Stoics

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~ Cicero